He also intended to chip away at Chaz Braden’s alibis in Hampton Junction during the week of Kelly’s disappearance. The town had its share of people like Nell, with sharp eyes and long memories. One of them might have noticed Chaz when he was supposed to have been in New York.

Earl had suggested it might be useful to stir up local memories, very circumspectly of course, regarding Samantha McShane around that time. Circumspectly indeed… with all the nosing around he was going to do under the watchful eyes of Nell and her network.

Not that he’d have trouble getting people to tell him things. One of the burdens of a small-town practice was knowing the secrets of an entire community: the lies, the concealed failures, the hidden disappointments, the masked betrayals, the deeply buried hatreds – all eventually told to him, as surely as the threads of a web led to its center. These days people seemed to feel more comfortable confessing to a physician than to a minister, priest, or rabbi. He figured it had to do with a doctor’s obligation to be nonjudgmental.

The train slowed, and the stop for Poughkeepsie, a gray brick station blackened with grime, eventually slid into view. As he watched the people get off, his cellular rang.

“Hey, where are you?” he heard Dan say as soon as he pressed the TALK button. “I expected you back last night.”

“You sound like a wife.”

“No, just a mother hen.”

“Something came up in New York. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home. Should be there by three-thirty.”

“Would her name be Mandy, by any chance?”

“No, Mother! And if you’ve nothing better to do than carry on like Nell-”

“Hey, I’ve been busy. After you showed me all the press clippings your daddy kept on the maternity center and the home for unwed mothers, I got to thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“I wondered if he’d had a similar interest as coroner, so I spent this morning going through all the crates of records we got stored in the White House beneath the jail. Sure enough, he saved a couple of boxes of stuff in there about those two places. Considered it important enough to mark Do Not Discard on the side, and nobody did. Looks like death certificates and birth records.”

Mark felt his heart quicken. Death certificates from the home for unwed mothers would have come to him routinely because the place fell under his jurisdiction. But the birth records, and anything at all from the maternity center, he would have had to send for specifically.

“Now I can’t make head nor tail of them,” Dan continued, “but I figure you might be able to tell what he was after.”

“I’ll swing by the White House and pick them up on my way home.”

“There’s more. I spent all yesterday looking through the copy of the NYPD file you left me. Their investigation back in ‘seventy-four was pretty complete. They even pulled Kelly’s phone records from her Manhattan apartment. That’s where I found something else interesting.”

Dan had to get a life, he thought. This twenty-four/seven stuff might be good for law and order in Hampton Junction, but not for his mental health.

“She made three long-distance calls the morning of her disappearance. The first was to the Braden estate. One of the maids told the police she remembered Kelly asking for Dr. Braden. The maid told her he wasn’t in and that Chaz had already left for New York.

“Kelly placed her next call to the home for unwed mothers. No one there remembered it. Maybe she didn’t identify herself, the police figured, and was still trying to reach Chaz. He occasionally dropped in at either place on his way to the train and did consults on newborns with heart murmurs. Except that morning he went directly to the station, by his own account. The police checked. The time lapse between the time he and the house staff said he left and how long he had to catch the morning express to Manhattan allowed no detours. So if she did call looking for him, she would have been told he wasn’t there either. At least that’s what the police report figured.”

“Okay.”

“Kelly made a third call, this one to the maternity center, presumably still looking for Chaz. Again, no one remembered her phoning, but the police once more didn’t make anything of that.”

“Where’s this going, Dan?”

“That last call cost her four-fifty. The two previous ones less than a dollar. I didn’t think anything of the difference at first. Hell, a long-distance minute on hold would have eaten up a buck easy those days, before the breakup of AT &T. But I took a closer look at the record, and found she spent ten minutes on the line. She might have reached him there.”

“You mean Chaz Braden lied about going straight to the station?”

“Not only that. If he stopped by the clinic, he would have had to have left the house earlier than he said to make the train at all.”

“And the household staff and people at the clinic went along with the lie?”

“Probably because they’d no choice but to protect their boss’s son or lose their jobs.”

It didn’t make any sense. “Why would Chaz risk so many people being able to expose him?”

“The key lie would be his insistence that he hadn’t spoken with her since she left the estate bound for New York the day before.”

“Any theory about why he wouldn’t want the police to know something so mundane?”

“You tell me. But if she talked to him, at last we’d have a chink in that prick’s story.”

2:30 P.M.

LaGuardia Airport,

New York City

“Hope you don’t have stinky feet,” Earl said to Janet, watching the security officers make a lineup of passengers take off their shoes. The roar of a departing plane blistered the air, making him raise his voice.

“Smart-ass!” She stepped in close to him, took his face between her hands, and gave him a long soft kiss on the lips. “You be careful,” she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, and give Brendan a hug for me.”

“You bet. And you call to give me an update every night.”

He grinned at her. “Sure.”

“It’s not funny, Earl. You make your poking around too obvious, and I’ll end up reading your name in the Herald. Mystery Lover Found.”

“Come on.”

“Come on, yourself. Chaz Braden looked like a big vulture, hanging around at the memorial, eavesdropping on everyone. He’d love to find out whom she met in that taxi and shift suspicion from himself. And from the angry expression on his face whenever he glanced in your direction, I’d be afraid he already suspects that you were having an affair with his wife.”

“If you asked me, he looked pissed off at all Kelly’s old friends. He probably thinks it could be any of them. Otherwise, he would have served me up to the cops by now.”

“My, aren’t you reassuring?”

He grinned down at her, tightening his embrace. “You look beautiful.”

“What I am is frustrated. There are leads Mark Roper should be following that have nothing to do with her old friends and needn’t put you in danger.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve been thinking about Kelly, and there’s a piece missing. The first thing a woman in her predicament would do is arrange a divorce. Back then, God knows where she’d have had to go. Reno, maybe? Mexico? The Dominican Republic? Did you try that angle when you looked for her?”

“No, I never thought of it.”

“A man wouldn’t. You tell that Mark Roper he should see if she got that far. It might help him piece together her movements before she died. He has to do that, at least, if he hopes to find new evidence to prove hubby or mommy or whoever killed her.”

“I’ll tell Mark.”

The boarding call for her plane came over the PA.

“Good-bye, love,” she said, giving him a second kiss even softer than the first. “And don’t forget. Call me every night, be careful of Chaz Braden, and talk to Mark about what I said.”